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Total War Official Rulebook
The object of Total War is to become the new gold standard in professional wrestling, gaining financial and critical success in one of the toughest corners of the entertainment biz. Sign the best talent, tell the best stories, and outlast your opponents as they attempt to do the same. The wrestling audience is vast but finite, and it’s your job to carve as big a piece of it as you can. Setup Establish your brand First, choose a name for your wrestling promotion. Have a theme in mind! The field is about to become crowded. How are you going to stand up against all the other hungry feds? Have an idea of what style or styles of wrestling you want to feature, and what kind of stories you want to tell. How many titles will you have? Will you have intergender matches? Who is your audience? This will help you decide what talent you want to recruit. Wrestling is a medium, not a genre. Not all wrestling fans are looking for the same thing in a wrestling promotion. Certain kinds of wrestling storytelling appeal to one audience more than others. The key to establishing yourself as a promotion may lie in winning the loyalty of one kind of fan in particular, or in establishing a balance to please as many people as possible. Audience Wrestling fans come in all shapes and sizes with a wide variety of tastes, but Total War splits them up into three essential categories: Marks (50% of initial market, $10M/mo) Kids, parents, and average everyday folks who enjoy professional wrestling alongside any number of other interests. It may not seem that way when you look at Twitter, but this is who makes up most of the wrestling audience. Before the great calamity that wiped every wrestling promotion off the map and kicked off Total War, most of these fans didn’t even know there were promotions other than WWE, but now they’re ripe for the picking. * Likes: Simplicity, morality tales, familiarity, soap opera silliness, attractive people, unbridled spectacle. Mostly here for a good time and along for the ride. * Dislikes: '''Blood & gore, thinking too hard. Nerds (25%, $5M/mo) There’s a lot of crossover between wrestling fans and their close cousins: comic book geeks, gamers, sports nerds, and internet weirdos. On the positive side, this is an audience who respects professional wrestling as an art form, and knows the business inside and out. On the negative, they’re contrarian snobs who all believe they could book the show better than you can. They see themselves as tastemakers and gatekeepers, which is mostly only true within their own bubble, but they do hold some influence over Marks. * '''Likes: Athleticism, work rate, underdog stories, continuity & consistency, realism, but also whatever’s new and weird. Being on the ground floor of something. * Dislikes: Delayed gratification, repetition, whatever the Marks are into right now. Edgelords (25%, $5M/mo) Edgelords are the subset of fans who openly acknowledge and embrace the destructive, nihilistic side of this bastard performance art. They want to see blood. They want to see daredevil jumps and falls. They want to see someone cheat death for a hot dog. The edgelords contingent also includes the slice of fans that pines for the return of the Attitude Era, when wrestling was for grown-ups (read: adolescent boys). * Likes: Blood, weapons, stunts, swearing, cool heels, tweeners, adolescent sexuality, unpredictability. * Dislikes: White-meat babyfaces, kid-friendly content, anything that smells corporate. Build Your Roster Now it’s time to assemble your roster. At the start of the game, each player will get to hire 40 full-time wrestlers for their roster. You can choose from the pool of literally every wrestler currently working. (What counts as “currently working?” Your ringmaster gets the final say on that.) At the beginning of the game, rosters are determined by way of a draft. Here’s how the draft works: *Create a list of the 20 wrestlers you want to have in your promotion, ranked in order of how badly you want them. (#1 is your first draft pick, who you’ve just gotta have.) Send this list privately to the ringmaster—don’t share it with the other players! They’ll all be doing the same thing. *Once all the players have submitted their lists, the ringmaster will randomly select a draft order, and begin distributing the wrestlers in order of the players’ preference. **Most likely, there will be overlap in these lists and no player will get exactly the 20 wrestlers they asked for. If player ahead of you has already selected one of your picks, then everyone else in your list slides up in rank and the draft continues. (Maybe another player already got your #3 pick, so now your #4 pick becomes your new #3 pick and so on so you don’t miss your turn and become more likely to get your remaining picks.) *When the first set of picks have been distributed, then the draft continues until each player has 40 wrestlers. If one player ends the first round with only 15 wrestlers (due to their picks getting selected ahead of them) while another player gets 18, for instance, that first player will get to make 3 picks before the second player gets to make any, thus preserving the priority of the 16th round draft pick, etc. **Why not just have everyone make lists of 40+ to begin with? Because depending on how your first 20 picks go, you may find you want to change your plans. Maybe many of your favorite female wrestlers were picked ahead of you in the first set—you may want to add more women to your list in the second round to balance your roster. When the draft is complete, now you have your first opportunity to interact with your opponents and negotiate some trades. Maybe you each got half of a tag team in the draft—here’s your chance to reunite those pals. At this stage in the game, however, there can be no two-for-one trades. Everyone must have 40 full time wrestlers when you’re done. How Wrestlers Work Wrestlers are the stars with whom you’ll create your universe. They all have their own unique traits which can’t be exactly quantified, though as Total War expands and develops they’ll get more specifically measured. For now, there are only a handful of numbers that tell you what a wrestler can do: *'In-Ring (out of 10):' How captivating is this wrestler in the ring? Do their moves dazzle? Are they a master of telling a story through physicality? Do audiences cringe at their pain and delight in their triumphs (or vice versa?) *'Promo (out of 10):' How good is this wrestler at selling the build to a match? Are they great at connecting with the audience on the mic? Are they a startling physical specimen that people will pay to see in action? Essentially: can they sell a story and get asses in the seats? *'Fame (out of 5):' How big a name is this wrestler in the business? Are they a relative unknown that hasn’t yet made their mark? Are they someone people will buy tickets to see regardless of what they’re doing on the show? Fame can be a bonus to a match anticipation roll, but beware—wrestlers often know exactly how famous they are and if they’re not paid enough or booked to their satisfaction they may jump ship to another promotion. *'Injury (out of 5): '''How likely is your wrestler to get hurt during a match? Any time there’s physicality in profession wrestling, there’s a chance someone could get injured. Now, these are professionals, so there should never be more than a 10% chance that something goes wrong, but every match, there’s a 100d roll on each performer to determine their safety. Roll a value at or below their injury value, and there’s an accident. **Determine the severity of the accident with a d10. 10 means a career-ender, 1 means a false alarm, and anything in between is how many months your wrestler will be out of commission. These wrestler stat values may or may not be visible to players, and they may be adjusted by the ringmaster at any times based on in-game events or simply a desire to balance the game. At the beginning of the game, each wrestler is paid the same amount for a year’s salary: $100,000 for a one year exclusive contract. Depending on how successful your promotion is and how well your individual wrestlers perform, they may ask for much more than that when it’s time to renew. However, pro wrestlers also expect bonuses for working pay-per-views, so factor that into your budget and planning. How you pay your PPV bonuses, whether you choose flat rates, a percentage of the PPV profits based on card position, or somewhere in between, is up to you, but be aware that your talent knows what your competitors are paying. Part-Time Talent There are times when your own main roster talent just isn’t suiting your needs. Sometimes you want to get a pop in audience interest by booking a wrestler from outside your promotion. Other times you want to make one of your wrestlers look strong but don’t want to squash another person from your roster. That’s when you need part-time talent. *'Special Attraction''' talent costs will be determined by the ringmaster *'Jobbers' cost $500 an appearance. Non-Wrestling Talent Wrestling stories aren't told exclusively by athletes in the ring. You may want to recruit non-wrestlers to serve as on-screen authority figures, managers, valets, or other characters. Before the first storytelling turn begins, you may draft non-wrestlers to your promotion, with a one-year exclusive deal costing $50,000. Like with wrestlers, these contracts become negotiable at the end of the first year of play. =Gameplay= The bulk of Total War is played by describing the stories being told in your promotion, building audience anticipation for monthly Pay-Per-Views on television, and then rewarding your audience with shows that will make them glad they spent their hard-earned money. For purposes of Total War, we’ll presume the production costs of TV and PPV events are a wash—for now, you only have to pay for talent, and TV appearances are already paid for in your full-time talent’s contracts. The Introduction Phase Now that you have your concept and your talent, it's time to introduce yourself to the world. Give your fellow players a taste of what they should expect from you when your promotion launches. There are no dicerolls here, just a paragraph or two setting the stage. Here's an example of what an Introduction phase might look like: One World Wrestling is a professional wrestling show for a global audience, bringing together the best talent from every corner of the wrestling world and touring on an intercontinental circuit. It’s a sports-oriented product, where who you root for is likely based more on where you live than classic “face/heel” dynamics. Story and character will always matter in OWW, but most of the promos are sports-based interview packages rather than in-ring antics, which alleviates language barriers and allows for more actual wrestling per episode. OWW is the Olympics of wrestling, with its talent split into teams representing the four geographical centers of the wrestling world: Excalibur - Europe, Ireland, & The United Kingdom The Fed - Canada & The United States Los Nuevo Santos de Lucha Libre (The New Saints of Professional Wrestling) - Mexico & Latin America Sasuke - Asia & Oceania The sports-first broadcast and promo style mostly eliminates the need for managers and other non-wrestling personalities on the show, but there is one major exception: OWW Commissioner Rey Mysterio, who will occasionally be called upon to make matches, statements, or decisions. Weekly TV - The Build Phase Each promotion runs a weekly TV show, the purpose of which is to build your brand and your talent, and to promote your PPVs. You need to strike the right balance between giving your audience something they want to watch each week, while also leaving them hungry enough to pay for PPVs. Here's what you should try and accomplish with your TV time: *'Gather your audience:' Most fans find your promotion via TV, and buy your PPVs based on how much they like the show. Keep them watching and they’ll reward you! This is done by putting a variety of high quality matches with exciting stars on television. *'Showcase your roster:' Most professional wrestlers aren’t in it just for the paycheck, they’re performers who want opportunities to ply their trade and bask in the adoration (or hatred) of the crowd. There’s not room for every wrestler on every PPV, but you’ve got to keep your talent hot to build new storylines, and TV is the place to do it. *'Build anticipation for PPV matches:' This is done via promos, and to a lesser extent, matches, on TV. When wrestlers cut promos about an upcoming PPV match, it increases the likelihood that audiences will buy the PPV. This is the most important one, since your number one goal is to keep people paying for PPVs. During the TV phases of each month, players will describe the between 6 and 8 stories their promotion runs leading up to the PPV. The ringmaster will perform match quality and promo rolls based on those descriptions to determine audience excitement and PPV match anticipation levels. Comparing that excitement to that of your competitors will decide what share of the market your PPV wins that month. Different stories may appeal to different segments of the audience. The ringmaster will attempt to determine how excited Marks, Nerds, and Edgelords are for each of your stories and what proportion of each audience is going to buy your PPV. Players should describe their on-screen and in-ring stories in paragraph form, giving the ringmaster and other players a sense of what the show should feel like, but they also must specifically call out each time they use any of the following devices, which the ringmaster will use to determine success: *'Match:' Any time the bell rings. The quality of a match is determined by average of all participating wrestlers' In-Ring stats, plus a d20 roll, plus or minus other modifiers for stipulations, gimmicks, or specialties at the ringmaster's discretion. Whenever a match happens, there is also an Injury check made for every participant. **You can add a stipulation to a match like Last Man Standing or Ladder Match, but be aware that many stipulations mean additional costs. If you need props, or if you're planning on breaking something, you're going to have to spend money, but it may increase the peak potential score of your match. (Just don't overdo it. Audiences can get bored of a stipulation if they see it too often.) See the Price List for the current cost of a gimmick, prop, or stipulation. *'Promo:' Any time performers are spending time doing something other than wrestling. The quality of a promo is determined by the average of all the participants' Promo stats, plus a d20 roll, plus or minus other modifiers at the ringmaster's discretion. If a promo gets physical (meaning, if a wrestling move is used), then an injury check must be performed, but it may score you a positive modifier for your promo and allow your wrestlers' In-Ring scores to enter the mix. Promos all fall within three categories: **'In-Ring Promo:' When performers are delivering their promo in the ring or ramp area, in front of a live audience with no additional camera, lights, or microphones. Unless you're adding props into the mix (like a table for a contract signing), In-Ring Promos require no additional costs. They're also the hardest to pull off cleanly, because you're forced to surrender some control to the live audience. **'Backstage Promo:' When performers are performing a scene live, backstage, for a camera crew. This costs a little money because you have to dress and light an additional set and employ additional crew, but it also allows you a greater variety of possible settings and scenarios, as well as a divider between your performance and the audience. **'Video Package:' A polished, produced short film promoting a wrestler, feud, championship or other concept. This may include talking heads, footage shot of training, visits to homes and hometowns, anything that might help to sell an audience on something in a tight one-to-five minutes. Video packages are expensive, but they're also very effective. Video packages can accentuate your wrestlers' strengths and minimize their weaknesses, which is why they will always get a +10 promo score modifier. (This is subject to change for gameplay balance purposes.) Your Build Phase should bridge the gap between your PPVs, dealing with the Fallout from the one behind you, and setting up the one ahead. In all but your first turn of Total War, you'll begin by addressing the consequences of your last PPV. Here's an example of what the Build Phase for one story might look like: Women’s Championship Picture: Having successfully defended her OWW Women's Championship at Top of the World, Asuka keeps herself fresh with an exhibition match against one of her Sasuke (Team Japan/Asia/Oceania) squadmates, Xia Li. This is clearly a mentor/student type match, with Asuka coming up ahead and the pair sharing a post-match bow. The civil atmosphere in the ring is broken when Becky Lynch strolls down the ramp to announce her intention to become Asuka's next challenger. Asuka does not respond to the challenge. During week two, Asuka responds to Becky Lynch’s demand for a title opportunity, insisting that no one gets a chance at her title unless they earn it. She asks Commissioner Rey Mysterio to set up a fatal four-way match for number one contender, featuring a rep from each team. The match is Natalya Neidhart vs. Xia Li vs. Lady Shani vs. Becky Lynch. Naturally, Becky wins, tapping out Shani. The following week, the two of them keep fresh with warm-up matches against their opponents’ teammates (Becky defeats Toni Storm, Asuka defeats Piper Niven), and then against each other in a tag team match between the four with Becky tapping Toni again. MATCH: Asuka* vs. Xia Li IN-RING PROMO: Becky Lynch BACKSTAGE PROMO: Asuka & Becky Lynch MATCH: Natalya Neidhart vs. Xia Li vs. Lady Shani vs. Becky Lynch* MATCH: Becky Lynch* vs. Toni Storm MATCH: Asuka* vs. Piper Niven MATCH: Becky Lynch* & Piper Niven vs. Asuka & Toni Storm Pay-Per-Views - The Payoff Phase Wrestling fans only have so much money to spend on wrestling, which means they can only watch so many PPVs in a month. Which ones they buy each month is based on who makes the best case for themselves on television, as well as who best delivers on audience anticipation on PPV. If your TV sucks but your PPVs are always good, you may buy some loyalty maintain your PPV audience—but it won’t grow. If you’re TV’s great but your PPVs underwhelm, audiences will be fine saving their money and just watching free TV. At the start of the game, the total audience budget for wrestling PPVs is $20M. That means if there were four promotions running who each performed equally well in their first month, they’d each gross $5M from their first PPV. (For some perspective, your contracts in the beginning of the game are worth $40M/year. If these four promotions split the market exactly evenly for that entire year, they’d each gross $60M. $20M sounds like a pretty safe net, until you consider PPV bonuses and the likelihood that your talent will expect more money from their next contract. The total value of the wrestling economy can grow if all promotions produce TV and PPVs, or it can shrink if everyone’s product goes sour at once, but unless the buzz around pro wrestling in general is particularly good or particularly bad, all promotions will end up fighting for a share of a static market. Your product may influence the relative proportion of Marks, Nerds, and Edgelords make up the total wrestling audience. How well you build anticipation to your PPVs, and how well you deliver on that anticipation, determines what share of Marks, Nerds, and Edgelords your promotion wins in a given month.